Rising Above the Fray

Why the Canada–U.S. debate poses the wrong question — and what we gain by taking it up a level.

The first issue of Seeing Straight — a column that takes complex questions up a level, to where a change of vantage changes the question itself, clears away the false choices, and lets us see what actually matters. To open it, the argument of the hour: the one pitting Canada against the United States.

I. The Vacant Ground

On September 8, 2026 — the moment Canada's counter-tariffs took effect, striking some C$20 billion of American goods with duties of 15 to 50 percent — the quarrel between Ottawa and Washington stopped being a negotiation and became a trial of strength. The table had been overturned in late August, each side accusing the other of adding last-minute demands; only the day before, the White House had threatened to bar the sale of Bombardier's aircraft on American soil unless the company moved its production south. No one is bargaining anymore. They are measuring each other.

Faced with this hardening, the commentary has sorted itself into two camps, and only two.

The first sees an act of aggression. Washington's demands strike them as illegitimate and disproportionate, designed to erode Canadian sovereignty; the only self-respecting answer would be to loosen our dependence by dropping anchor elsewhere — Europe, other partners.

The second sees a bill coming due. Canada, they say, neglected its own security for forty years or longer, let its defence wither, looked away as transnational crime and foreign influence advanced; the European pivot is an evasion, and the only serious course is to bet on Washington — to become, through hard-won credibility, a partner that carries weight.

Put plainly, one camp asks: how do we pull away from the United States? The other: how do we make ourselves indispensable to them again?

Between these two positions, nothing. Or rather, a silence. I look, in what is being written, for the voice that would refuse to pick a side without ducking the fight — and I cannot find it.

Let me be understood, for everything turns on this: the vacant ground is not the middle. The debate hands us, as a test of allegiance, what is first of all a question of strategy; it demands we take a side where we ought to be asking whether the question is even well posed.

It is not. The question is wrongly framed, and the debate is the worse for it. The task is not to choose between the two camps, nor to retreat into a mushy middle, but to rise above the fray — the only vantage from which we can see straight.

II. The Wrong Frame, or the False Choice

Let us take the two camps again, but slowly, undoing what they knot together too quickly. Each, in truth, answers three distinct questions in a single breath — and it is from running them together that the sense of an unavoidable choice arises.

The first question is normative: are the American demands legitimate? The second is diagnostic: how did we get here — did Canada, yes or no, neglect its security? The third is strategic: where should the effort go — toward Europe and new partners, or toward a deepening of the American tie?

Public debate folds these three questions onto a single axis — for or against the United States — and demands we pick an end of it. The first camp answers as a block: demands illegitimate, neglect overstated, course set for Europe. The second answers as the mirror block: pressure justified, neglect real, course set for Washington. And because each block presents itself all of a piece, we believe we must take it whole or throw it out whole.

But the three questions are independent. Nothing forbids — and rigour, to my mind, requires — holding that the American demands are largely coercive and corrosive of sovereignty (with the first camp), that Canadian neglect is nonetheless real (with the second), and that neither pure strategy holds up (against both). That combination exists. It is, I believe, the truest one. But it is strictly invisible on the axis where the debate has settled, because that axis forces you to carry a whole block or throw it out entire.

One example is enough to feel the slippage. That Canada underinvested in its defence for a generation is a fact; that this should be made the pretext for tariff pressure, or that fentanyl — whose volumes across the northern border are in fact minuscule — should be brandished to dress the manoeuvre up as a security imperative, is another thing entirely. The diagnosis can be partly true and the weaponizing of it largely false. The debate, though, demands we swallow or spit out both together. It is precisely this refusal to sort that renders it sterile.

III. Seeing Straight Is Not Splitting the Difference

I will be told that I am describing a middle ground after all, a position of balance between the camps. It is the opposite, and the distinction carries everything else.

The middle is a point on the warped axis — halfway between two blocks no one has taken apart. It is an average, and an average of two framing errors is still a framing error. Seeing straight is not standing at the centre of the fray: it is stepping out of it, climbing a level, and taking the questions one by one, each on its own plane. From up there, the truth may sit close to one camp on the normative question, close to the other on the diagnostic one, and at a distance from both on the strategic one. It need not be symmetrical. Symmetry is a courtesy; accuracy is a duty.

This must be said flatly, for the age readily confuses the two: false balance is not a virtue. To spare both sides equally, when the faults are not equal, is not measure — it is a refusal to judge dressed up as even-handedness. Rising higher does not excuse you from deciding; it lets you decide where it is true, and not where it is convenient.

IV. What Height Makes Possible

Once the three questions are separated and each set in its place, a fourth surfaces — the one both camps, absorbed in their quarrel, skirt together.

For the debate, beneath its strategic dress, almost always turns on the same object: which protector? One says Europe, the other Washington, but both are looking for someone to shoulder the country's security and prosperity. And it may be that this is the question wrongly posed at the root. The real question is not which support to turn toward, but whether a country can go on subcontracting the conditions of its own safety indefinitely and still call what remains sovereignty. Forty years of comfort in a powerful neighbour's shadow: at what point does that comfort stop being a piece of good fortune and become a form of captivity?

And what if the real question were this: what capacities must Canada hold to become, once again, the author of its own choices?

I do not settle it here — that will be the work of the texts to come. I only lay down the plane on which, it seems to me, the quarrel becomes intelligible at last: not the choice of a camp, nor the choice of a patron, but the very posture of a country that long preferred quiet dependence to costly capacity.

V. The Ground to Take

This is the ground I mean to hold in the weeks ahead. Not to arbitrate between two angers, but to take the file up a level, question by question.

The texts to come will descend toward the concrete, one plane at a time. The plane of neglect first: what is real in it, and what it is made to say that is false. The plane of the false opposition between Europe and Washington — two courses cast as rivals that, rightly understood, reinforce each other. Then the plane of credibility, that currency the second camp invokes without seeing that it presupposes exactly what the camp refuses. And, at the end, the question beneath: what it would take for a country to stop being a stake in others' calculations and become, once more, an actor in its own.

Until then, one thing asks only to be granted, and it is all this first text requires: amid the noise of the two camps, the best place is neither the one, nor the other, nor between them. It is above.

This text also appears, with the full series, at leadership-conflits.com.